The value of a woman's life

We need to make sure that we do not take the blame for the
violence that is visited upon us. We need to develop a sense of self that
cannot be eroded, a sense of self that is rounded and whole. It is what saves a
woman in the final analysis.

Imagining a world without violence against women sounds
deceptively simple but the act of imagination is, in fact, quite revolutionary.
Especially for women. Because before we imagine, we must question. And that is
a habit that has not been encouraged in us.

So weighed down are we from the moment of birth by
preconceptions about our role in the so-called natural harmonies of this world,
that to question is nothing short of revolutionary. To imagine is to see beyond the status quo the possibility of a
new world, a new reality. Starvation does not allow the hungry to imagine food.
Our censors – cultural traditions and lack of power – click into place, lock
down our imagination and so it becomes our secret garden. To share it we need
courage and hope.

I have spent the last 23 years opening up this secret garden
to public access through my work with Southall Black Sisters. I have written at
length about domestic violence. However this article is not an analysis of the
issues but a personal perspective on how violence and casual neglect pervade
the lives of women.

In a dark, air-less barn filled with bales of straw and
smelling of dried buffalo dung, an old woman scraped the black carbon grime off
a wedding carriage with a hardened fingernail. A 12 year old girl watched as
the silver struggled to shine through and glint in the small shaft of light
that had entered through a hole in the barn door. She looked up in wonder at
this near-sighted woman with the pendulous breasts and gnarled hands and tried
to imagine her as a young bride about the same age as herself, removed from her
mother and being pulled by bullock cart to her new home – with a 16 year old
boy whose temper was yet to leave its imprint on her.

The woman was my grandmother and the little girl was me.

I had heard stories, the stuff of legend, about her life
which I dared not ask her about. Not because she would get angry. That had been
beaten out of her a long time ago but because there are silences that pad out
the fabric of all family life. If you poke at the silences, you are in danger
of puncturing the fabric.

If the walls could speak, they would have told me how she
had to make hot chapattis for my grandfather, one by one, run down the spiral
staircase from the kitchen to the men’s quarters where he ate, run back up
again, make the next one and make sure it reached him before he had finished
the last one – or else he would throw the iron bucket at her, the same bucket
in which buffalo milk was delivered in the mornings.

She had thirteen children and only five survived. Her deep
physical and emotional loss that no one talked about, least of all her –
another one of those silences which shrouded the violation of her body.

My mother told me how once she had worn her best clothes – a
skirt made of 40 yards of material - to vote in the elections. My grandmother
voted?!!! She believed she could change the government but not the situation at
home? And in the scrum that is so typical of Indian elections, she gave her
sister-in-law the slip and tried to jump into the local well. But the
sister-in-law caught up with her and stopped her from putting an end to the
misery of it all.

As she got older and needed glasses, they were often without
lenses and we children laughed at her empty frames as she burnt her fingers or
stepped blindly into mud. She died a few weeks after my grandfather when they
were both in their eighties. And so began the process of burying the truth; the
years of violence that she had endured were lost in the family myth that theirs
had been a great love.

My father asked me to travel 7000 miles, from London to
their village in Haryana, to attend my grandfather’s funeral but said not a
word when she died a few months later. She didn’t matter. She didn’t enter into
the scheme of things. Neither her life nor her death was mourned.

I offer you this skeleton, this anatomy of a life, and ask
you which of these single acts you would most condemn. The truth is that
wherever they fall on the scale of cruelty, they all arise out of one single
thing – the lack of value that is attached to a woman’s life. That
translates into low self-esteem and allows us to tolerate ways of being, of
living that do us harm.

Of course much has changed. Not to acknowledge that would be
to negate all that women’s actions have achieved and the pressure for change
and protection of women that they have demanded from government and community.
There are a number of UN, EU and national laws dealing with the elimination of
violence against women. In Britain, we have a battery of laws to protect women
against domestic violence, forced marriage, rape and trafficking, to name but
some of the issues, backed up by a
network of refuges and women’s centres. Of course these need to be better
resourced, the police better trained and the rate of convictions in rape
higher. We need to end patriarchy.

But meanwhile we need to build a society that nourishes the
development of the unassailable self. We need to develop a sense of self that
cannot be eroded, a sense of self that is rounded and whole. And it isn’t
something that can be easily rescued if it has been so utterly crushed in
children. It is what saves a woman in the final analysis.

Let me give you an example. I remember talking to Kiranjit
Ahluwalia shortly after she came out of prison in 1992 where she had served
three years for killing her brutal husband, after experiencing ten years of
violence from him. And how troubled she was by the women she met at Southall
Black Sisters. Had they sustained a deeper cut, a bigger bruise, more broken
limbs, she would ask me, guilt-ridden, and yet they had not resorted to her
ultimate act of survival? Was she somehow weaker or more evil? They all lived
in a country that offered some protection, they were all to a lesser or greater
degree constrained by religion, culture, gender and race and yet there were
some women who escaped and some who didn’t.
Although I could offer her no reassurance, no answers, on reflection I
realised that a tentative answer lay in her childhood. She was the youngest in
a family of nine, she was orphaned at the age of 16 and was the favourite
‘spoiled’ child of the family. The
security and attention that Kiranjit received as a young child gave her that sense
of self – that allowed her one day to stand up and say no more, I will take no
more.

We need to guard against all those tiny invisible ways in
which we erode that sense of self. Every time we tell a young girl to dress
modestly and not attract attention to herself in manner or make-up. Every time
we praise one body image over another. Every time we elevate certain ideas of
beauty above others. Every time we blame her behaviour for being raped or
assaulted, for being drunk, for being promiscuous, for being out at night – in
short for doing any of the things that would be acceptable for men.

We need to guard against all those many ways in which we
condition young girls to accept violence as the cost of their gender: when they
have to assume the responsibility of keeping families together no matter what,
of submitting to marriages that benefit the wider family, of carrying the
family honour, of having their genitals mutilated in order to keep virtue
intact. Most of all, we need to make sure that we do not take the blame for the
violence that is visited upon us. I have worked with young Bengali girls in the
East End of London for whom to lift their heads and eyes to the horizon was an
act of rebellion. Every young girl should be able to raise her head and look
beyond the horizon.

Violence against women knows no boundaries, taking place to
a greater or lesser degree across
community, culture, religion and class. In Britain alone, almost two women on
average are killed by violent men every week. One of the earliest cases in
which Southall Black Sisters became involved was that of Balwant Kaur, an Asian
woman, who was brutally stabbed to death in the 80s by her husband in front of
her children at the refuge to which she had escaped. To remind ourselves when
the question arises in our mind – why didn’t she leave – that women are most at
risk when they are leaving a violent relationship or shortly afterwards.

I wrote a poem for a fund‑raising memorial held by the
Balwant Kaur campaign which remains as valid today.

Bloodlust

There you lay oozingBlood ran cold, blood ran dry.A solitary fly buzzingStunned by the echo of your death-criesStifled by your blood-constricted throatBrutalised by a knife's gyration.

Sister, all your imagined wrongsThat moved his hirsute wristInsinuatingly through dark alleywaysTwitching inside an overcoatSeeking your final submissionCalling out your guts.

Children peeking, unbelievingYour mother and I are talking,He says - blood spillingWhat kind of talking is that?Let it be the last.

You will not be consigned to dustTime must not healNor memory concealYour blood will not congealOur actions.

Come we will show men what fear is When courage stalks a women's raised fist.

Read other articles in the series, 16 Days Activism against Gender Violence

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